


Should I stay or should I go now?

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: AU Fix-it, Angst and Feels, Bodhi can kind of tell what's up but isn't too sure how to deal with it, Character Study, F/M, Feels, Gen, Jyn is not good at feelings, Jyn's debate whether or not to stay with the rebellion post-Scarif, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, neither is Cassian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 02:23:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12644202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: Jyn is struggling with so much in the aftermath of the battle of Scarif.  Trauma and shock, anger and grief, and an endless inner debate; is she staying, or not?





	Should I stay or should I go now?

Jyn Erso has fought a hundred battles in the days since Scarif, has fought with anyone and everyone who would face her; from friendly sparring in the gym to tense clashes with generals who gape at her temerity, to hissing rages at the med droid who tells her “next of kin only” each time she pleads for information. 

It feels as though every interaction she’s had with the Alliance has been violent in some way, either directly and openly so, or deeply, and hidden, the geology of anger a cold hard rock beneath the green of their thanks.  

None of them had wanted her back, the vicious heroine who inspired a mutiny and showed them all up.  It shows in their embarrassment, in their faces, their silences.  She isn’t a clean-cut hero to celebrate and fete.  She’s messy; she complicates their victory when they need it to be simple, this first big shining blow they’ve struck for freedom.

And still she slogs it out in the training sessions, speaks her furious mind in briefings, hovers at the med-bay doors just the same.  Asks for news: “Cassian Andor, please, I need to know, is there any change?  Bodhi Rook, the rest of the survivors from Scarif; is there anything you can tell me?”

But the worst fights are the ones she has with herself.  Lying asleep, every event of the last few weeks blurring and twisting into endless variations of nightmare war and final death; time after time she starts up, running in sweat, staring into darkness.  Then, fighting off sleep, lying awake, she finds herself seeing those faces over and over.  They are lined up in the hangar, looking across the crowded hold of the stolen shuttle, standing up to do their duty and face their end for her.  Grim and hopeful, doubting and certain.  Her team, Rogue One.  Most of them now dead.  Their blood on her sleeves, a dozen more stains tallied to her account. 

She goes back; back to training, back to another meeting, back to the med-bay.  She wants to be part of this, however fucked-up she is and however more fucked-up it makes her feel.  She wants to fight.  She wants to help, somehow.  Wants to stay.  But it cannot be right, that she should.

She wants to see the survivors.  See Cassian, and the others.

But she isn’t One of Us yet and she never will be, and she isn’t next of kin, and the doors are shut.

Every instinct tells her there is no good can come to her and stay with her, and no good can come with her if she stays, either.  Tells her too that the men who lived cannot possibly hope to see her again, the woman who took them into that place and killed so many of their comrades.  That Bodhi will want only to get free now; and Cassian Andor will never be safe unless he is far from her. 

He attached his goals to hers when it was expedient, but he will not, cannot – must not – extend their acquaintance now.  It puts him in too much risk, to be near her.  Already merely by fighting at her side, Cassian has marked himself for death.  At her worst she knows that; he must be doomed now, no-one has ever stayed with her and lived. 

She makes up her mind, shaking and bitter but sure.  For their sake, she’s not staying.  She only wants to see them one last time, though it be just to say goodbye.  Cassian and Bodhi, and the other pilot, Joma, and that tall handsome fellow Tonc and the older man with the beard whose name she still doesn’t know, and Melshi whose face was still carrying the bruises she gave him when he walked into the valley of death with her, and the three others who escaped from the ground troops.  See them alive, know they really made it. 

Then she’ll turn away for good, and go before her bad luck can reach them.

She’s not staying.

**

It’s the end of the eighth day before she sees him at last, coming into the mess hall.  He’s moving carefully, on crutches, and slow.  When he turns it’s with an effortful precision that speaks of spinal implants still settling-in, and pain levels beyond the reach of analgesics.  But he’s walking, he’s alive and out of med-bay and moving around, alert, here.  Bodhi is with him, battered and scarred but also mobile, also looking around.

Cassian scans the room methodically until their eyes meet; and his faint smile thrills and terrifies her.

If they’re out, then the others must also be.  In the shuttle, escaping, they two were by far the worst injured of the survivors.  Yet she hasn’t seen any of them, and the damned droids haven’t even told her that anyone had been released from med-bay. 

Well.  No wonder she feels excluded.

Rage fills her, comfortable familiar rage against everything; against the Alliance and the Empire both, against her lost parents and the friends who have not come, not one of them to find her now; against the universe itself for thwarting every hope and every chance she’s ever had.  Every time she tried to be more than just a rag of a life, battered and torn and slowly shredding itself against the gale, providence has torn her down.  She’s not a good person, not a good soldier or a good woman or anything worth having, but she is not worthless either and she has tried to do something right.  This time, she’d thought she had.  For all the horrible casualty figures and the dreadful days that followed it, Scarif had not been a failure.  The dead did not follow her and Cassian in vain. 

The Alliance has no business throwing her off like a piece of rotten fruit.  She cannot, she cannot let this be how it goes.  Fuck them.  She’s not finished. 

She has no idea what she’ll do, or who she’ll have to fight to get them to let her stay and make herself useful to the rebellion.  But Jyn is staying, no matter what and no matter how, until they win at last, or until the chances are spent and her last chance kills her.  She’s staying!

No, she can’t, she mustn’t.

She wants to.  Belong.  Stay.  Fight.  Not run anymore; be home at last, be one of them. 

She looks across at Cassian and very slowly, fearful and angry, she nods in acknowledgment.  She wants to do more, and has no notion how; fights through a wall of instinct and assumption and gut-wrenching certainty; forces her lips to curve upwards, nervous and hopeful and very, very unsure.

By the time he’s manoeuvred himself through the tables, and negotiated a dozen eager well-wishers, to settle awkwardly into a seat beside Bodhi, she’s reached the servery hatch and piled two plates high with all the best things she can reach.  They had a produce shipment a few days ago and the fresh stuff is still good.  She hopes he likes eggs and beans and curd.

Cassian is just starting to lever himself up again when she arrives.  “Sit,” she tells him.  “Eat.  I got you food.”

“Uh – but –“ his protestations tail off before they’ve got fully started at the sight of the plateful slapped in front of him.

“Ah, Jyn – that’s enough for three,” Bodhi observes.  His scars ripple as he grins. “You trying to – trying to fatten him up?”

“You need the nutrition.”  Jyn places a knife, fork, spoon beside the plate.  Ignores the fact that Bodhi’s comment is if anything an underestimation.  There’s probably enough for four, unless they were all starving.  But maybe he is.  “Eat, Cassian.  Bodhi, help him with it if there’s too much.”

She looks down and tucks in, to shield her discomfort from their eyes.

When she looks up next from her own plate, Bodhi is grinning, and Cassian is eating.

His eyes are half-closed in pleasure as he shovels in scrambled eggs and refried beans and spiced curd and greens and peppery seed-sprouts.  He eats desperately, like a man who hasn’t tasted food in weeks, and fast as one who believes his meal will be taken from him.  Jyn finds herself speeding up as she watches, matching the movements of her cutlery to his, watching his lips as they work, as they become greasy, and are licked clean again, over and over.  There’s something both hypnotic and unnerving about the way Cassian devours his food.  Only his ecstatic expression shows he’s even tasting it. 

It doesn’t matter now that none of the others spoke to her when they got out of med-bay.  Cassian and Bodhi are here, eating with her; and neither of them looks askance at her, or turns away from what she can bring to the table (an overloaded platter of food, an abrupt word or two; not much better than her bluntness in briefings, her defensive aggression to well-wishers, but it’s what she has to offer, what she is, her rough self, longing to be one of them.  Longing to be near).

She matches him mouthful to mouthful; she wants to be sitting here forever, with him alive and before her at last.  She’s been starved of so much, for so long; not just fresh vegetables and food with actual food in it.  She’s forgotten what it feels like to be with others, to have a purpose, to share anything.  She tasted it, that day in the hangar and on the flight to Scarif, shared purpose, shared hope; and it led to death.  But it is still possible to look at a friend and know trust.  To see someone come into the room alive and well, and care that they are so. 

She wants to devour it all along with the food. 

Bodhi watches them both for a while before saying good-humouredly “It isn’t an eating competition, guys…”

Jyn’s face and throat feel hot and she sets down her fork abruptly.  Cassian looks up, spoon poised in mid-air, incomprehension flickering across his face.  Then looks across at Jyn, just as she touches the flushed skin of her neck.  The anxious look stills in his eyes; and then heats. 

What can it look like, her mirroring his eating like some bizarre automaton in a show?  He’s staring at her like a man looking into the sun.  Is she that alarming a sight?

She says “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” and is about to take her plate and move away.  Every encounter she’s had with anyone, since she came here, has always gone wrong like this.  Even now.  Even him.

Cassian stretches out his free hand.  It shakes.  “Please,” he says, and freezes, as though the word is a choke on his throat.  “Please.  Don’t.”

“Don’t?”

“Go.  Don’t go.  Please.  Stay.”

Jyn is breathing fast as though she’s been running.  Panting, at the sight of him, the sound of his clumsy words.  When did that happen?  She remembers their hands touching in the shuttle – _I’ll tell the others_ – and his shocked smile then.  He’s over-breathing too, now, but as their eyes meet he is pressing himself into a weak, frail smile, more stunned even than that one was. 

Very slowly, very carefully, as if the precision of this gesture is the most important thing he’s ever achieved, he sets down his spoon and raises his hand.  Touches his own throat, mirroring her.

“Please stay,” he says again.  Breathless.  Smiling.

Jyn’s mouth smiles too, involuntary, flaunting for one terrifying instant the feelings she can’t articulate.  Shock.  Disbelief.  Joy.

“How about,” says Bodhi, looking from on to the other “we all eat our food and then you two just find somewhere to sit quietly with a – a – cup of tea or something.  Hmmm?”

“There’s a cantina in the third pyramid,” Cassian says.  Very quiet, as if it’s scary to hear his own voice.  “We could – get a drink.  Maybe.  Or – or tea, if you prefer.”

“A drink is good.” Krif yes.  She’ll need it.

She bites her lip and moistens it, registering without being able to believe it how his eyes widen slightly.  Her hand is very close to his on the table-top.

A drink.  Or tea.  Or something.  Is it possible?  He doesn’t seem to think she’s bringing his death.  Nor does Bodhi.

Perhaps she can belong; perhaps her fears are irrational.  She knows they are; but knowing in the mind and knowing in the guts have taken their time to match up. 

She’s staying.  Oh Force, yes; she can belong, she can be home.  She’s staying.


End file.
